Pathologies of viable systems

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Pathologies of viable systems

Breakdowns trace to “malfunction in one of the five subsystems,” where a cybernetic rule “will be found not to be functioning” (TBYT 2009, “The Viable System Model”: 147–148). Being there ≠ viable: “effectively there, witness universities, nor efficiently there, witness hospitals” (TBYT 2009: 148).

What Beer says

  • Repeal of requisite variety — people “attempt to repeal the Law of Requisite Variety itself” (TBYT 2009: 148).
  • Takeovers — promised autonomy “is poppycock”; the Law of Cohesion shows the new recursion takes variety from the subsidiary (TBYT 2009: 149).
  • Identity — “Will the system still be able to recognize itself? More particularly, will others be able to recognize it?” (TBYT 2009: 149).
  • Four missing — “usually, virtually empty”; “the whole metasystem collapses into System Three” (HOE 1979: 265).
  • Five into Three — they “dive down into the problem that they understand so well—never to emerge again.” “The collapsed metasystem is a special pathology. It is a decerebrate cat” (TBYT 2009: 150). Same dive “straight into System Three, or (worse) straight into a muddy bog in System One” (HOE 1979: 266).
  • Pathological autopoiesis — “turn self-production into an end-in-itself” (HOE 1979: 410). Healthy autopoiesis is only System One; Two–Five should “exhibit no internal autopoietic behaviour whatever.” When they do: “The Establishment” (HOE 1979: 412).
  • Ultimate — “failure of its cohesiveness, and of its inter-recursive algedonics” as “an aberration of its autopoietic function” (HOE 1979: 408).

Where it sits in the model

Diagnosing the System for Organizations against the five subsystems and the Principles and axioms of organization. Cohesion and algedonics fail together.

Textual notes

Four diagnostic points quoted from “a learned journal,” endorsed not originated (TBYT 2009: 148–149). Establishment definition prints “vital principal [sic]” (HOE 1979: 412).

Punch and Judy

Punch and Judy argues that the pathology catalogue, treated as prediction, has never been tested and cannot easily be: being generated from the model rather than collected from a case library, it always has a name ready for whatever happened (Ch 24), and the chapter on the category-error shelter lists the catalogue as prediction among the claims a purely performative reading would have to withdraw (Ch 21). Its related charge is that the community’s unbroken record — that nobody has found a case where the model failed — describes how the field records its work rather than the model itself (Ch 17; Ch 18). These are the manuscript’s arguments, several provisional, not findings against Beer.

Open points

Journal of the four points: Brain and Strategy 4(9) 1978 (TBYT 2009: 157 n.15); author/title unidentified. HOE’s “Identity: an exercise” later called “Test of Identity” (TBYT 2009: 150) — HOE does not use that name. Draft not canon (Pure VSM — Overview).

Part II — The Viable System Model · Viable System Model · Stafford Beer · Punch and Judy — Overview